Browsed byCategory: 2015

Milagros is much loved by her students. When we passed through the gate of her school a pair of them ran up and embraced her on either side, pressing their cheeks against each of her hips. In class the students are anxious to show her what they’ve done. During our conversation later in the day, children came to hug her and offer her parts of their lunch. Her school is far away from the more developed center of Arequipa, Peru and while the surrounding area doesn’t resemble the archetypical images of poverty in the developing world, it’s clear that there isn’t much money here. Milagros transferred to this school to have the opportunity to teach 2nd grade because, “Many of the children don’t know how to read or write. And that is something very important to me.”

I asked Milagros what surprised her the most when she started teaching last year, “The teachers, because they don’t have any passion. But I think I understand maybe why, because they always have trouble with money and time, and the government doesn’t respect their jobs. But many of the teachers get so angry with the students.”

Milagros reminding her class to raise their hands to speak

A couple weeks earlier I spoke with a pair of young German women who had just finished a year of teaching in Peru. I asked them what they thought the biggest problems with education in Peru were and they were quick to answer, “The problem is the teachers.” They described classrooms where the teacher would simply sit in the back of the room and read PowerPoint slides. “The students aren’t motivated but I wouldn’t be motivated either… And who would want to be a teacher when you get paid around 350 Euros a month?”

The other German explained how her co-teacher at a private school had to share a house with five other teachers, and then the more animated one spoke up again, “I think a lot of it is how…” she had trouble finding the words, “In Germany, if you say that you’re a teacher, it’s like,” her face lit up, “‘Oh, you’re a teacher!’ but in Peru if you say you’re a teacher,” her face turned sour, “It’s like ‘Oh… You’re a teacher.’”

In a taxi in Cuzco, I asked the driver what he thought about public education in Peru, “The main problem is that there isn’t very good instruction. The teachers don’t have a good education and they don’t know how to teach.” He then spoke with pride about his son who had recently graduated and was now studying biology. But he was certainly not impressed with his son’s teachers.

Milagros’ school and the volcano that looks over it

Even Milagros’ principal was critical, “The teachers here,” she said with some hesitation, “keep to themselves. They are not always trying to get better and sometimes they lose patience when they get older. But this is something we have to work on.” Talking with Senora Mamani was interesting because her demeanor reminded me so much of the sharp and dedicated administrators I know in the Unites States. People who are trying to do as much as they can with limited resources. But Senora Mamani’s resources are even more limited than her U.S. counterparts, since she is the only administrator at the school.

And this may be the single most startling fact I’ve learned about education in Peru. Jose Revilla told me that while there are about 60,000 schools in Peru there are only 48,000 people in administrative positions other than principals. When you consider that many wealthier schools have many administrators the situation looks even more dire for schools like Milagros’.

How can you expect teachers to get better if there is no one to coach and support them?

“Ojala que vengan. We don’t have personnel here. We don’t even have anyone to clean,” said Senora Mamani when I asked about other administrators. She then offered the same resigned but committed smile-shrug I’ve seen so often in administrators in rural Louisiana.

The School Principal, Senora Angelica Guispe Mamani

An article in El Comercio (a major Peruvian paper) quotes education experts saying that the main reason most people become teachers is because more selective fields are out of their reach. They’re looking for an occupation that’s easy to get into.

Senora Mamani cited a lack of parental support for their children’s academics as the primary obstacle to education, but when I asked why parents aren’t supportive it turned out that this too was connected to the prestige of teachers, “I think it’s because they don’t respect the teachers. They think that teaching is a simple activity when, in reality, it’s completely the opposite. It’s the most difficult.”

Elizabeth with students at recess

Teachers are the foundation of a country’s education system. In the United States, public policy focused on merit pay, and the transformation of tests from tools for student assessment to weapons for teacher evaluation, has triggered a backlash to this kind of ‘blame the teacher’ talk. But the reality is that the U.S. suffers from many of these same problems (though to a lesser degree). And with this in mind, I think it’s interesting that none of the people I talked to in Peru spoke of a need to fire or punish bad teachers. People only spoke of the need to provide more support, more training, and more resources for teachers.

It’s true that teachers can’t be the only agents of change in turning education around, but we shouldn’t forget that they are by far the single most important force in the lives of students and that the spectrum of teaching is very, very wide indeed. Unfortunately, policies in many U.S. states have served to poison this conversation and have scared many accomplished people away from, or out of the profession. I wonder how different the dialogue in the U.S. would be if policies focused on how to help teachers develop instead of how to rank them according to their students’ scores on multiple choice tests? As Jonathan Kozol once said, in a less than eloquent metaphor, about students and testing: “You don’t fatten the sheep by weighing them.”

It seems that in Peru people know what to do but they don’t have the resources. In the U.S. we have the resources, but we don’t seem to know what to do with them.

After almost a week in Arequipa, we decided to take a two day hiking trip into Colca Canyon. We booked the hike through our hostel and were picked up at 3am by a small bus. The first stop was Cruz del Condors- a look out point known for glimpses of Andean condors, the largest flying birds in the world.

Here’s a pic with human beings for scale:

During the stretches when we couldn’t see condors, we admired the cactus flowers.

Next we arrived at the trail head at the top of the canyon, and looked down to The Oasis where we’d sleep that night.

We paused to enjoy the breeze.

And admire the giant cacti.

Some stretches were long and not that steep.

We paused to rest.

And admired how far we had climbed down. Over 3,300 ft. by the end of it.

Eventually we reached the river at the bottom.

Some locals prepared us lunch. Alpaca stirfry.

And we relaxed.

But we still had several miles to hike to the oasis and we were getting tired.

Still, when we looked back to admire the valley behind us we saw that it was beautiful.

Our guide paused to explain about the culture of people in the canyon and how different plants were used as natural remedies since there’s no hospital around. We knew we were approaching civilization when we started seeing ads.

After almost 7 hours of hiking we finally reached the charming streets of The Oasis.

We drank some beer and had a nice dinner. We started hiking back up at 5AM the next morning (sorry no pictures). We were given the option to take a mule up instead, but we declined.

On the way back we stopped in small towns with markets and cool colonial churches.

We also stopped for views of the pre-Incan terraces that are carved into the mountains.

The terraces stretch for miles and miles and truly cause you to marvel at how rich the civilization which created them must have been.

The final stop was at over 16,000 ft. above sea level where we could see the peaks of several volcanoes. But here’s a pic with the rest of our hiking group. Four Spaniards and a woman from Macao.

Depending who you ask, Colca is either the deepest or second deepest canyon in the world, though we didn’t hike into the deepest part.

The hike was tough, but all in all, it was one of our favorite parts of the trip so far.

If you’re in southern Peru, you should definitely check it out. You can always take the mule back up.

The day after Machu Picchu, I woke up to an unholy alliance between my sinuses and bowels. I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in days. My body ached, I couldn’t breathe, and my trips to the bathroom left me demoralized and anxious. Liz reminded me that we had to check out of the hostel at 10:30. That night we had a ten hour bus ride. I cringed at the thought of just sitting up in bed. A stream of questions added a self-inflicted insult to injury: “What am I doing here? Why did I think this trip would be fun? Can I handle over nine more months of this?”

In the months and years leading up to this trip Elizabeth and I would often try to measure our excitement by reminding ourselves that it wasn’t going to be comfortable. We mentally prepared for long bus rides and resigned ourselves to the fact that we’d get sick, probably more than once. Actually being sick is different story, but at least we came prepared.

And this is probably the biggest lesson we knew, but have now internalized. If you’re going to do extended travel outside of the developed world: Bring Medicine. Here is a list of the meds we brought and have already used in our first three weeks.

Azithromycin (diarrhea anti-biotic)

Cipro (diarrhea; I’m allergic to arithromycin)

Loperamide Hydrochloride (anti-diarrheal)

Rehydration salts (rehydrate after diarrhea)

Zantac (acid in the stomach)

Pepto-Bismal (all things stomach)

Claritin-D (allergies and congestion)

Zicam (cold symptom relief and prevention)

Emergen-C (cold prevention)

Purel (obvious cold prevention must)

Advil (aches and pains)

Kleenex (we’ve gone through a ton of these)

I eventually rolled out of bed and re-packed my bag. Liz wasn’t feeling great either. She had sharp pains in her stomach and felt generally weak. We spent the next eight hours camped out on the couch in the lobby waiting for our bus. We watched the hostel move, the dogs come and go. At one point, the man at the front desk tucked me in with a blanket (pictured above). And at least we weren’t spending any money.

By the time we arrived in Arequipa, Elizabeth’s stomach had cleared up. Mine would take a few more days. I worried I might have had some sort of superbug but it turned out Elizabeth had misread the dosage frequency on the Cipro. (For more on the importance of quickly forgiving your spouse for innocent oversights see our previous post). We took things easy for a few days in Arequipa like we planned, and I appreciated the fact that there are worse places to recuperate.

It’s been over a week now since I was writhed in bed doubting the whole idea of this trip. Things have changed. We’re now on a bus heading toward the Chilean border. In 48 hours, we’ll be in San Pedro de Atacama, surrounded by deserts, volcanoes, and the best stargazing in the world. A couple days ago, we hiked to the bottom of the deepest canyon in the world and then back up again. My sinuses haven’t cleared up and I’m on a daily Claritin habit, but life is good. We went to the pharmacy in Arequipa to restock on our meds and again, we feel prepared. There are no more doubts. I feel on top of the world.

We got in line for the day’s first set of busses at 4:30 AM, to make sure we were some of the first people let into Machu Picchu. The air was cool, and clouds clung to the nearly empty ruins around us.

We climbed a not often climbed set of stairs.

And started to explore the architecture.

We got friendly with the local llamas,

and started to wonder: what’s cooler, Machu Picchu or the surrounding mountains?

Elizabeth was quick to point out that the Incas thought of them as one and the same.

We looked around and congratulated ourselves again on arriving before the crowds. It really is pretty cool to be here alone.

After a little over an hour of exploring the ruins, we decided to take advantage of the second part of the tickets we purchased and climb The Mountain! The Mountain is advertised as a trail, but it’s really more of a 2,000+ ft. staircase.

At first, the views below us were clouded in, well, clouds… But soon Machu Picchu began to appear.

After a few thousand more steps and many breaks, we reached the top.

And we saw that it was good.

Eventually, we had to head back down… Parts were treacherously narrow.

And parts went through charming patches of rainforest.

But the views were more clear now, and we paused to take them in.

When we returned to the bottom we were exhausted.

We looked back and up look at The Mountain and felt a swell of pride. See that tiny little flag up there? That’s where we were.

But now it was time to leave. On our way out, we took one final photo.

It was only 1:00PM but we had had quite a day. We were tired, on top of the world, and still hours away from realizing that germs already inside us were about to take advantage of our exhaustion in the most unappealing ways. But more on that next week.

It’s no wonder Machu Picchu was only rediscovered about a century ago – it’s not easy to get to. We did the trip in 5 days and that seemed fast. Getting to the Incan city involves arriving in Cuzco (we did it by bus, but you can also fly), getting to the town of Aguas Caliente (we took a 4 hour train), getting from Aguas Caliente up to Machu Picchu (we took the 30 minute bus), and then the whole thing in reverse to get back.

And that’s only one way to do it. Some people hike the Incan Trail (a 4 day excursion) or stop in the Sacred Valley on their way from Cuzco. You can also skip the 30 minute bus ride and hike up to Machu Picchu from the town. These are not the only choices. Options and combinations abound!

Some people hire a tour company to put together portions or all of this trip. Knowing this would be one of our most expensive excursions, Will and I decided to do Machu Picchu without a tour and put together the whole thing ourselves. Here’s what we booked.

**We spent another $130 on food in Cuzco and Aguas Caliente combined. We ate out for dinner but made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Breakfast was included in both our hostel stays.

Highlights:

Trying New Foods in Cuzco

Coca Tea: Made from coca leaf, this tea is used to calm altitude sickness – which we greatly appreciated! Our hostel offered an endless supply in the form of loose leaves and hot water.

Alpaca:We paused for a second when the filets came out medium rare, but I’m so glad we threw caution to the wind, because it was tender and delicious. Better than elk (Will tried it at Yellowstone).

Quinoa:Unlike any quinoa we had tried before! Creamy, cheesy, with potatoes. I can’t wait to figure out how to make this at home.

Cuy (Guinea Pig): Our guinea pig arrived with an orange pepper in its mouth, perched on top of a larger, stuffed pepper. After setting the platter down, the waiter crowned it with a little vegetable hat and offered to take our picture. The guinea pig was then returned to the kitchen to be quartered for sharing. It tasted a lot like rabbit, unsurprisingly. This traditional Peruvian food is obviously quite celebrated – we saw it depicted in several Peruvian churches on the table at The Last Supper.

The Vistas in Aguas Caliente

Aguas Caliente is lost in time – a tiny city nestled between rainforest covered Andean peaks. The streets are connected by bridges, and trains (the town’s only connection to the outside world) run through the center. Our hostel had a rooftop bar that felt perched in paradise. I’ll let the pictures do the rest of the talking.

Seeing the Ruins (almost) Alone

What’s better than gallivanting around cloud-ringed ruins by yourself as the sun comes up? You feel like the original explorers, discovering something ancient and mysterious. You get to have one on one encounters with the resident llamas. You get to see the views without all those people in the way. We had to take the first bus to get up there in time for this experience– which meant a 3:45am alarm. We also bypassed the ruins near the entry gate, where many tour groups get held up, and made a beeline for deeper locations. Being at Machu Picchu almost alone? Worth every effort.

Summiting an Andean Peak (La Montana)

When I read the description, it said that the climb up Machu Picchu Mountain (La Montana) was a moderately challenging hike on a wide path, following an old Incan road. Well, Incan’s didn’t really build roads as much as staircases. This hike was a 2 hour staircase up a mountain.

I didn’t consult Will when I booked our Machu Picchu tickets with the La Montana hike included. I told him it was the easiest hike available (which I believe it is…yikes.) About half way through he turned to me, exhausted, and asked, “Are we SUMMITING this mountain?” Luckily, he was excited to do it.

Worth it. From multiple points along the way, we saw Machu Picchu from above, in addition to the surrounding landscape. Not to mention the accomplishment of summiting a mountain in the Andes! I successfully didn’t throw up.

Confession: we were completely freaked out by the thought of taking a bus through the mountains of South America. Will even cited it as his greatest fear on our journey. I binged on negative TripAdvisor reviews and created contingency plans in my head if we were robbed or in an accident. When buses crash in Peru, they sometimes fall more than 1000 feet. But we wanted to see the Andes, and we didn’t want to pay the high cost of flying. So we took the bus. In hindsight, we are so happy we decided to travel this way because, not only were we safe the entire time, we got to see the countryside of Peru and some awe inspiring scenery.

When you hear “traveling South America by bus” you usually think of a rickety bus with the luggage strapped to the roof. While that is definitely still an option, South America also has some beautiful buses with big leather seats, on demand movies, and meal service. Given the treacherous nature of the Lima to Cuzco route (there was a US travel advisory about this route in 2013), we decided to take one of these very safe, more comfortable companies that tracks their buses by radar and has two drivers who take shifts. While more expensive, it was still about a third of the price of flying (if you count the hotel room we didn’t need to book.)

We arrived at the Cruz Del Sur bus station in Lima at 4:45pm for our 5:30pm bus. In Lima, each bus company has its own station, so you must go to the right one. We checked our bags at the central desk and waited in the cafeteria for boarding to begin.

Boarding was quick and easy – they checked our passports and inspected our carry-on bags. The whole bus was loaded in about 15 minutes. Heading out of Lima, it got dark very fast. We unfortunately didn’t have much to look at as we departed. This is what our seats looked like:

Everything was smooth sailing down the Pan-American highway. We settled into our leather recliners and each watched a different movie on our entertainment screens. After about 4 hours we tried to go to sleep. That was around the same time the road turned into an amusement park ride. Back and forth, up and down mountains. Just when we thought we’d hit a stretch of straight road, the bus would turn again. I’m not sure when I dozed off.

I do know I woke up at 6:30am high up in the mountains with a terrible case of altitude sickness. Will stumbled to the bathroom as the bus followed the swerving road. “I just almost threw up.” He reported. I ate one of the rolls we brought from Lima and started my regimen of Pepto Bismol tablets and Advil. This is also when we noticed the breathtaking scenery – the reason we took the bus. We wanted to see the Andes Mountains. Please note, most of these photos were taken through a dusty bus window, while in motion.

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Right after Abancay (a very small city), perched on the side of a hill, the bus came to a stop and the doors opened. Several people got off. Curious, Will and I stepped outside to find one of the two drivers feeding a stray dog out of his lunch container. Will asked him what was going on in Spanish. He replied, “It’s the middle of the day,” and gave an emphatic shrug. We saw that we were in a long line of stopped vehicles. Suddenly a boy selling soda and a cart selling oranges appeared, going from stopped vehicle to stopped vehicle. People from the vehicles in front of us were walking up and down the road, chatting, smiling, buying oranges. Will and I took some photos and chatted with a French couple for about 30 minutes until the driver called, “Amigos!” and motioned for us to get back on board. The title photo shows the view from the road.

We arrived in Cuzco around 4:30pm. After picking up our luggage from the check desk, we hopped in a cab with a couple from Italy and were at our hostel in 10 minutes.

The truth is: there are some risks associated with bus travel in Peru, but many of those same things (motor vehicle accident, robbery) can happen when you are living your life at home. The route from Lima to Cuzco is extremely winding, and you feel it even on a good bus. But if you can handle sitting in a recliner and watching movies for 20+ hours, you can handle this bus. The payoff is seeing all of Peru, and hours of priceless views!

Cheers,

Elizabeth

P.S. Prior to this trip, I searched all over the internet for information about bus travel from Lima to Cuzco. I hope this is helpful to others! Feel free to reach out with questions.

The Pamer school in Lima isn’t like most schools in Peru, but its classrooms would fit in at almost any charter school in the United States. Each classroom has the school’s vision and mission posted on a board. The most effective teacher we saw made use of call and response attention getters, “Yo-Yo,” she says, “Hey, Hey” responds the class. When it was time to focus, she called them to a learning posture similar to SLANT or SPARK but with the interesting addition of smiles. “I’m going to call on the student with the biggest smile,” she said. And there they sat, a class of just under 30 students, all sitting up straight, with beautifully authentic smiles on their faces.

As we drove to the school, Jose Revilla, the Executive Director of Ensena Peru, apologized for not being able to take us to a public school – they were on vacation. He explained that Pamer is a middle-income school that focuses almost entirely on preparing students for college entrance exams. He lamented that this narrow focus confined teachers to focusing mostly on the memorization of facts and rules, at the expense of more general education competencies. It was a frustration that was echoed by the teachers we talked with.

“What stood out to me the most is how confining the school is. The students don’t have time to express themselves or explain what they think*,” said Fiorella a first year upper elementary teacher with Ensena Peru. She compared the school to her own education where her exams were more like interviews, and she had many more opportunities to develop skills that are more important in life. When I asked what skills she thought were most important she answered, “The ability to argue and explain their thinking. The ability to work in teams.”

Diana, another teacher explained, “It’s like all they are used to is to say, A, B, C, or D. When you ask them to explain ‘why’ it’s like ‘what do you mean why?’ Even working in pairs is unusual. They are only used to teachers telling them what to do.” Diana has had some success pushing students to explain themselves more, but it’s been a lonely battle and still in the context of explaining answers on multiple choice tests. Liz, a former lawyer turned fourth grade teacher, was disappointed the students didn’t have more opportunities for arts and music since the tests focused mostly on math and grammar. Even the most effective teacher we saw, Fernanda (not an Ensena Peru teacher) was still engaging students at a fairly low level of thinking – preparing them to answer basic questions about grammar.

Talking with these teachers, it was also surprising how similar their presence and demeanor was to the Teach For America teachers we’ve worked with the past few years. They are tired, frustrated, and deeply committed to being a positive force in the lives of the children they work with. As Liz put it, “I love the work that I do. When you help someone, you gain more than them. It’s a world that’s yours, and I’m so happy in my class.”

From left to right; Jose, Will, Fiorella, Diana, Liz, Elizabeth

In fact, happiness was the prevailing emotion in the school. There was a palpable sense of joy amongst the students, and I don’t think it was just because we were visiting. Students laughed, supported each other, and smiled. Always with the smiles. Remember, Peru has some of the happiest students in the world. As Jose explained, public school teachers may not know their content very well, and the country may not have very high academic standards, but the teachers are very committed to building students self-worth and often believe that caring for their students is more important than the content they have to teach. Indeed, PISA’s international survey of teachers shows that Peruvian teachers prioritize developing a student’s personality more than teachers in almost every other country.

Jose went on to explain that, maybe that would be Peru’s saving grace. “Because,” he explained, “When you look at the most successful people in the world, they are not the people who know the most. They’re the people who are able to work well with others.”

Our day at Pamer has been one of the major highlights of the trip so far, and we hope to visit a few more schools before we cross the Chilean border.

Questions and comments are always welcome.

Cheers,

Will

A special thanks to Miluska and Jose for arranging this visit. It was awesome.

*A note on language. Some of the interviews in this post were in English and some were in Spanish. Where I felt uncomfortable doing a verbatim translation I paraphrased the main ideas of what was said.

On the eve of our first flight, Will went to bed congested, and I woke up with a knot in my stomach. When the alarm went off, I sat up and asked him how he was feeling. He said, “In love,” and I poked him in the ribs. He smiled and asked if I was sure I still wanted to do this. I couldn’t believe he was asking me that when I felt like I wanted to throw up. “Of course,” I said, “Let’s go.”

Over the past year, our departure date has grown to mythical proportions. We’ve repeated the phrase, “On August 4th we fly to Peru” hundreds of times. But as we actually set off for the unknown – knowing we wouldn’t return for 10 months – it was scary.

I started out a nervous ball of energy, feeling homesick, anxious, and a little weepy. Flying south with the east coast of the U.S. in the window, I tried to sleep off the urge to cry. When we landed at the Panama City Airport for our layover, my nerves downgraded to mild. The Hub of the Americas reassured me with its early 1990’s décor and ridiculously high end shopping. Just like when I first moved to Louisiana – I realized that in many new places things are different, but not that different.

Once we landed in Lima, most of my nerves were gone. The airport was bright and friendly. Immigration and customs were a breeze. We got our new SIM cards and hopped into the hostel car service. We’re staying at The Healing Dog hostel, which is complete with its own Peruvian Hairless Dog, Pisco. We decided to start out in a 6-person dorm to see if we could handle the cheaper option. Verdict: it’s okay, with earplugs. We have private rooms for the next two cities.

Day one was filled with travel gaffes. First, we spent way too many soles on coffee. Then we went on an odyssey around a high end mall to get our Machu Picchu tickets reprinted (I lost the reservation number.) Then we got ripped off by a cab driver. But the day was also filled with good food, new scenery, and general settling in.

Day two left us more empowered. We took off from the hostel early to meet with Ensena Peru (a Teach for America cousin) and visit with teachers and students. We will post about this experience soon – in short, it was wonderful and energizing. The visit reaffirmed that visiting schools around the world is the right thing for us to focus on. My ball of nerves is nowhere to be found.

There are some great blog posts out there about dealing with travel fears, filled with excellent advice. The trouble is that none of that perspective actually eliminates the anxiety, it mostly assures you it will pass. But this is okay, because I don’t want to eliminate the fear, I want to overcome it. When you are scared, or homesick, or worried and that feeling passes it is transformed into freedom, empowerment, and a smaller, more familiar world. This has now happened once, and I look forward to it happening many more times in the coming months. Thank you, Peru, for being my first anxiety transformed.

When people in the US talk about how to improve education, there is an underlying assumption that the way our education system works, overall, is ‘normal.’ When the struggles of schools in low-income communities are addressed, poverty is generally identified as the culprit. But after a year of research, and another year of traveling to excellent schools around the world, I can confidently say that there is nothing ‘normal’ about the education system in the US and that our reaction to students in poverty does as much to impact their potential than the poverty itself.

The five realities below are all rooted in data and they show that fundamental shifts are needed if our education system is to start preparing our children and supporting our teachers in the ways they deserve.

Reality #1 – U.S. Students Don’t Like School and Aren’t Very Good At It

This chart was created with the OECD’s PISA test data by Jake Levy, a data analyst at Buzzfeed. The scores are an average of math, science and reading. The x-axis is how students respond to the question, ’Are you happy in school?’ Economists have found a direct link between PISA scores and GDP growth and PISA scores have also proven a more accurate predictor of whether or not students will go to college than report cards. (Source: Amanda Ripley’s reporting in The Smartest Kids in the World and How They Got That Way)

As you can see, the United States falls into the ‘sad and stupid’ quadrant. Not only does our system fail to educate our children, but in the process, it turns them away from the idea that learning can be fun. Great. Why aren’t people unnerved about this? Are we, as a nation, resigned to ironic acceptance of our educational inferiority?

Maybe more interesting than what this chart tells us directly, are the questions it can spur. Like, ‘What’s the difference between Korea and Singapore?” They both score in the top 5 for performance but Korea has the least happy students in the world while Singapore’s students are some of the happiest. It turns out that while, South Korea is known for its high-intensity school system with near industrial size tutoring industry, Singapore’s education slogan is ‘Teach Less, Learn More’ and their education school emphasizes the central role of values and critical thinking.

OK, so that’s not completely true. For elementary school teachers, we’re #1. For secondary school teachers we’re #2, behind Chile. But still…

We know what teachers need to be more effective. They need: time to plan interesting and rigorous lessons, time to give meaningful feedback to students (multiple choice tests are most tempting when you don’t have time to grade), time for collaborating with other teachers, quality professional development, direct coaching from mentor teachers, etc… In higher performing countries like Switzerland and Singapore, all of these practices are central priorities. When I say they are priorities, I mean that they actually have time dedicated to them and they are seen as a fundamental part of a teachers job, not ‘something extra’ like it often seems in the US.

A High School teacher in the U.S. averages 1,051 hours in front of students per year. Compare that with the average of 656 hours for OECD countries. That’s almost 400 extra hours per year for all that good stuff I was just talking about! And that already takes into account the fact that we’re in school two weeks less per year than the OECD average!

Let’s not ignore the fact that even our top performers aren’t that great.

There literally aren’t enough hours in the day for U.S. teachers to do all of the things that correlate with better instruction. Teachers in the U.S. often complain about mandated collaboration but not because they don’t want it. It’s because they’d rather be planning or grading, and they don’t have time for all three. It’s also common for U.S. teachers to give up the limited planning time they do have, to do individual tutoring, which is noble, but it shouldn’t be necessary. That reality plays into a ‘teacher as altruist’ expectation that we would never hold to other professions. I hope that most doctors get into the profession to help people, but as a society, we don’t expect them to stay after hours to consult the uninsured.

There’s a very dangerous sense in this country that teachers aren’t ‘really working’ unless they’re standing in front of a group of students. How would you feel if I told you, you had to give 30 separate presentations next week, and not only did you have to deliver them, but you had to execute them so well that each of the 100+ people in the audience would be able to recall over 80% of the details at the end of the week and, by the way, they’re teenagers. How much time would you like to prepare for something like that? How much individualized management would you need to do to make sure people were track? How much stress would you feel?

Reality #3 – Our Most Privileged Students Aren’t that Great

Education reformers in the United States tend to focus almost exclusively on the ‘Achievement Gap’ – the fact that poor and minority students in the U.S. perform tragically worse than their more privileged peers. A built in assumption to this focus, is the idea that our most privileged students are being educated just fine. The problem in the US isn’t with the fundamentals of our education system, it’s with the consequences of poverty.

But, what if we just look at the most privileged groups in each country, including those who attend private school? How do our most privileged do against the most privileged of other countries? It turns out, not so well. When we look at just top quartiles in the PISA’s socio-economic breakdown we come in 25th out of 39 countries in math. And remember, our most privileged are even better off than most of their counterparts in other countries.

We should certainly be working to close the gap in performance between demographic groups, but let’s not ignore the fact that even our top performers aren’t that great. If we’re truly going to maintain our competitiveness in an increasingly global economy we’ll have to rethink how our best schools operate too.

* Since income and poverty measurements don’t compare well across countries, the OECD and PISA use what they call an “Index of Economic, Social, and Cultural Status” It takes into consideration things like the highest level of parents education, the types of jobs parents have, if there’s a quiet place to do school work at home, if the family owns art, and other questions that allow for a more normalized comparison of privilege across countries.

Reality #4 – A Country’s Education System Matters More Than Wealth or Demographics

Let’s look at Finland and Norway. They’re both Scandinavian countries with fairly homogenous populations and low child poverty rates. But Finland’s students consistently score as some of the most capable in the world and Norway’s students perform even worse than the United States. What’s up with that?

Let’s look at Poland and the United States. Both countries have similar levels of childhood poverty, and on the whole, U.S. students participating in the PISA have considerably more affluent home environments than their Polish peers. But Polish students achieve at much higher levels than U.S. students. Even more interesting is the fact that that, 20 years ago the U.S. outperformed Poland on international tests.

The least advantaged students in Hong Kong are worse off than the same group in the U.S. but they score just as well in math as America’s most privileged students.

Teaching needs to be a desirable profession for the system to improve.

Finland, Singapore, Poland, and China have all dramatically improved their education systems in the past decades while the U.S. has remained remarkably consistent in its subpar performance. Each country is unique, but all of their reform strategies had two things in common. 1) They increased the rigor of their standards. 2) They prioritized teacher preparation and professional development.

In the U.S., we’ve also tried to improve our education system in recent decades, but we’ve taken a different approach. We’ve tried to incentivize and manage improvement through a rigorous system of testing and accountability. A focus on incentives and accountability was a respectable idea in 2001, but it turns out that hasn’t worked very well.

Reality #5 – U.S. Teacher Morale is Going in the Wrong Direction

The 2012 “MetLife Survey of the American Teacher” showed that teacher morale in the U.S. is at a 25 year low. In 2008, 62% of teachers reported feeling very satisfied with their job. In 2012 that number was down to 39%. Over half of teachers reported feeling great stress several days a week. I believe that this dynamic is today’s single greatest threat to our nation’s long-term economic security. The causes of this dissatisfaction are complex but ultimately less relevant than its consequences. The simple fact is that, it’s hard for students to learn from people who are constantly stressed out by their jobs.

Teaching needs to be a desirable profession for the system to improve. But across the country applications to teachers colleges are on the decline and fewer and fewer people are applying to alternative certification programs like Teach For America as well. Why would intelligent/capable people want to pursue a profession where over half the people feel ‘great stress’ several days a week? It doesn’t even pay very well.

__________

Maybe this sort of lackluster education system was OK in the second half of the 20th century. Getting out of WWII with our infrastructure intact certainly gave us a good head start. For a few decades there, we were graduating a higher percentage of our people from college than any other country. But that percentage has flat lined at around 25% since the 1970s and the rest of the world is passing us by.

The solutions we come up with need to be uniquely American, but we’d be foolish not to learn from the rest of the world. We need to act and act big. Education isn’t going to fix itself.

I met up with Paul Griffin at The Possibility Project’s on West 27th St in New York City. What followed was the most interesting conversation I’ve had about education and youth development in a long time. Paul’s tone is animated and energetic and it’s not difficult to see that he once felt called to pursue his own career in the theater.

But something about pursuing his own career felt off to him. It seemed decidedly self-interested and he wanted something more. In the early 90s he began working with youth in Washington DC. He worked with them to use the performing arts as a way to explore the issues impacting their communities. At first, he didn’t think that he would do this type of work for very long, but he soon realized that the work combined everything he loves to do. Over 20 years later, I asked Paul what keeps him going.

Why do you think you continue with this type of work? Where do you get your energy?

That’s a good question. There are a lot of answers to that. If it were one thing, I probably wouldn’t continue to do it. I think that the thing that keeps me going is that it works, seeing the impact that we make. There’s no greater satisfaction than watching one of our young people, seeing the light bulb go off, and them getting with it and getting out there in the world and being confident. It’s just an exciting process. It’s an exciting process to watch, really satisfying. I think also, just the idea that I never had a moment in my life, in 21 years, where I ever asked myself if what I was doing is important. I’ve never asked myself whether it was making a difference or if I was making a difference. I never ask myself, ‘should I be doing this?’ On just a purely instinctive or intuitive level, from the moment we started, it’s just kind of been that way.

What’s unique about The Possibility Project?

I think it’s a combination of things. Every time we do a show or often when we do a show, someone always says, ‘Who thought of this thing?’ A friend of mine who was Chair of the Sarah Lawrence theater department, he brought me up there to teach, he’s in his sixties, and he came to see a show. He said, ‘you know, I thought I had seen every kind of theater in the world.’ He’s been all over the world, he’s directed everywhere and when he saw the show he said, ‘I realized this is a different kind of theater.’

I think the thing that makes us unique, more than anything else, is the youth leadership and youth empowerment pieces of what we do. They lead the program. They’re not the directors of the program, that’s just not feasible with them being in school and work and all of that. But it’s the fact that the production teams act like a board of directors for the program. The fact that they write their own scripts. The fact that they share their stories and then write their scripts from that. The fact that they do their own community action projects. The amount of responsibility they’re given, I think, is totally different.

One of the things we realized early on is that young people need to solve young people problems.

When young people walk into The Possibility Project, they recognize very quickly, ‘oh, this is our house. This is not like a bunch of adults telling us what to do. We get to do this.’ The peer-to-peer relationships are huge. I think that’s the most important thing we do.

We always say in our program, when we’re training Artistic Directors, remember the action in the program is not from you to the young people, it’s amongst the young people themselves. Your measure of success is not whether you have great relationships with them, it’s whether they have great relationships with one another. So, if you walk out at the end of the year and they respect you, and love you and all of that, which they will, they’ll look up to you if you’ve done a good job. If they forget about you two or three years down the road or you kind of fade but, they hang on to relationships they built, that’s ok.

Most people try to manage groups to a result and what we’re saying is, we’re not going to manage you. We’ll organize, we’ll give you this, we’ll help but, you have to do it. They have to do all the work. I think that’s the single biggest difference, and I think that’s why this is very risky and why it works.

What type of program is this anyway? Is it a youth development program? Theater program? Social justice program?

Yeah, youth development social change, combining those two, and the performing arts are the vehicle. That’s how I think of it. And I think the ultimate goal on the youth development side is confidence and on the social justice side, is around leadership and agency. It’s combining those two things, it’s saying, if we’re going to have a better world, we need young people to be on point. They need to be aware, they need to be educated and they need to, over decades, be studying these things so that when their turn comes, they’re prepared for it and know which direction they want to go to.

One of the things we realized early on is that young people need to solve young people problems. They have to rally around, they have to raise their voices. They need to be empowered, challenged, supported, inspired, motivated, to address all the problems of their community.

I think engaging in social justice accelerates the youth development process. It suddenly brings importance and relevance to their development, and then I would also argue, stepping back from that, that positive youth development, particularly for poor kids, particularly for poor kids of color, is a social justice issue in and of itself.

We’re moving away from raising our children in communities to raising our children on the principle of choice.

One of the things about the programs we run is that excellence is taken very seriously, and so is integrity and accountability. This is not ‘come in when you feel like it and we’ll play.’ This is like, ‘we have very specific things we want to achieve and you have to get on board with it’ and the demands are quite high. We see that as a social justice issue. Like, they deserve that experience as much as anyone else, do you know what I mean? And they deserve as much room to screw it up. People of color who screw up, sometimes the stakes are very high, a privileged white kid has more room to screw up and that’s a social justice issue.

What’s the relationships between school and community, between poverty and academics?

Let’s take it back. I think there’s a bigger problem than the nuts and bolts of the education debate around this issue. I think that we’re at a point in time where we’re seeing the fruition or culmination of a ‘unique evolutionary moment,’ as I refer to it. We’re moving away from raising our children in communities to raising our children on the principle of choice, right? I think that’s a good thing, I think that’s a positive, and I think what’s happening is that, we’re preparing our kids for the world their going to inhabit and that’s a good change. Because our kids are not going to grow up in communities anymore, they don’t. They grow up as individuals. So, when I was growing up I was raised to be a citizen and a community member. To be a good person, which meant treating the people around me as a good person would. Children today are being raised to be individuals, economic actors and agents who are going to be making choices. Who are going to decide where they want to live in the world. I’m talking about those who have privilege and everyone who aspires to that. So across the board, when we’re talking about young people we’re talking more about choice.

So for me, when we’re talking about schools, they haven’t caught up with that. The curriculum as such and their role hasn’t caught up with that. And what I mean by that is, they’re now being asked to serve a lot of the roles that the community used to serve. The character of young people, their inner life, social-emotional learning. Before that was done at home and in your community, and for a lot of people, in the church. Now we’re asking the school to do all that. Because the community doesn’t exist in the same way, because they’re being asked to make choices now, and because mom and dad are working. And they’re working really hard.

Everyone also knows that, from a scientific perspective, when you test things they fail, and you try again and they fail, and you try and try a thousand times, but when students fail here, we kick them out. That’s dishonest.

School is a very important place because it’s one of the only places young people gather as a community. If I was running a school, I would extend the school day but wouldn’t have it be school. From 3:30-6:00 run programs explicitly around social-emotional learning (SEL), and over high school it would go from fun to serious to independent study. And not just performing arts as the vehicle, a million other things.

Now, what’s important about doing that well. Because a lot of the time when people talk about doing SEL what they do is…

Garbage.

Right.

It needs to be experiential, young people need to be in control of its fate. It needs to have a goal that their working towards, and it needs to be fun, exciting, it needs to be compelling.

What should the impact of that type of programming be? What have you seen the impact be?

Confidence. I want them to be 100% confident that they can resolve the conflicts around them, 100% confident that they can do something about the world, 100% confident that they’re going to be OK. You know what I mean? I want them to feel capable and confident in everything they do. Because I think there’s this mistake…

Young people think, because they’ve been told, that there’s this mastery they need to have of life and then everything’s OK. And I think they need to understand that, there’s no mastery of life. There’s a mastery of confidence, if you want to call it that. The mastery you need is understanding ‘I can deal with this. I can figure this out.’ And that, by the way I think is a function of testing. If you test everyone, if there’s a test at the end, then everyone thinks, ‘oh, I have to master all of this so I can answer all the questions.’ But, do you know how often I’m tested in life, in my job in 21 years? Never. No one has ever made me fill out a bubble hole. So, how is doing that useful? It’s so old school, I’m floored. And to the point about preparing these guys for the world they’re going to live in, we all know that the idea of ‘the test’ is not how it works in the world.

And everyone also knows that, from a scientific perspective, when you test things they fail, and you try again and they fail, and you try and try a thousand times, but when students fail here, we kick them out. That’s dishonest. That’s teaching them, on some macro level, a very unscientific method, for all of our emphasis on STEM research. And the lack of integrity in education in that sense, is crazy.

Now, you’re not going to eradicate poverty and then have great schools, right. Because we all see schools as the mechanism for eradicating poverty.

I understand why testing is done. Testing is done so they can manage results like a business. But education is not business, it cannot be business anymore than a mother and father can come home and treat their children like their employees. Education is closer to parenting than it is to business. I understand why the system needs to be managed like a business, but the classroom and the individual schools needs to be managed much much much more closely to parent, family and household than like a business. Every teacher knows this.

The payoff with kids is often time a long way away. You don’t know when a kid’s gonna (snaps) get it. And a lot of it is beyond your control. It’s where their brain is, and nutrition, and the social forces that are going on in their lives, and I do believe that the single biggest destructive force in their lives is poverty.

If you try to engineer a teacher you’re going to fail.

Now, you’re not going to eradicate poverty and then have great schools, right. Because we all see schools as the mechanism for eradicating poverty. You use education to move up. But I do believe there’s a way for schools to address those forces in their kids’ lives so that they deal with them honestly. And then they need support from everybody else. So, if you go to east New York, south Bronx, Jamaica-Queens, and you have a poor community school. They need more than just being a school and we need to reconfigure that. We need to rethink that.

Internationally, the United States is one of the only developed countries that gives less resources to schools in high poverty areas.

That is so unfair it’s not even funny. That is the most unfair thing in the world.

(The conversation shifts to how adults who work with young people are trained)

If you try to engineer a teacher you’re going to fail. Young people can smell inauthenticity and irrelevance (snaps) like that. So a teacher, an adult, anyone working with young people has to be authentic and relevant in their lives, and be bringing something relevant to them as far as a teacher in terms of subject matter. Or make a subject matter relevant for them.

When you start teaching, we call it painting by the numbers, when someone starts teaching by the numbers, and they say something like, ‘what’s my response to that question?’ It’s like OK, pause, the response to that question has to be your response to that question, first and foremost, or they’re not going to buy it. I mean you have to digest the material, but then you have to get in there. And that’s really a theatrical technique. Given a script, digest it and then make it authentic.

How would you describe the philosophy of The Possibility Project?

So, we don’t have ‘a philosophy,’ but there’s a lot of things we’ve learned that we hang on to. So, I’ll tell them to you as we remember them over the course of the year. One is that every time we meet a young person, when we first meet them, we try to imagine them as positive, powerful, productive people as adults, and then we ask ourselves, ‘ok, what do they need to get there?’ We never ever take a pathological or deficit model. We never say, ‘ok so they’ve got these issues or those issues,’ it’s just not how we look at them. We envision them, imagine them as excellent. We know that they’re incredibly capable. They can do amazing things, just period. Not matter who they are. We have kids who have very serious deficits and all that and for us that’s no excuse not to be able to achieve, certainly in our context. I mean, acting, singing, dancing, anyone can do that if they want to, to some degree of success.

We see creativity as the highest form of empowerment.

There’re so many philosophies right, I think another one is that the key to unlocking everything for a kid is social-emotional. It’s not just cognitive. It’s not just educational. In fact, I would argue that it’s almost all SEL. And it’s funny right, because everyone says if we want a kid to go to college, we’ve got to give them tutoring, and SAT prep, and this and that, and the other thing, and I’m like well, if that kid gets lit up, if he gets motivated he’s going to figure out how to do all that for himself, she’s going to figure out how to do all that for herself. Which is one, more efficient. Two, you didn’t need to put in all these new dependencies. And three, it’ll probably stick. If they figure things out for themselves now, they can figure out everything else for themselves in the future, rather than have to find the next professional service for them to hire so they can take the next step in their lives.

Also, we see creativity as the highest form of empowerment. If you live your life reacting to what happens to you, muddling through, that’s one way. If you understand that your life is yours to create, that the future is yours to make, then you’re in a great place. You’re going to get busy making that future happen, confident, motivated, all of those things. But I think how you understand how to do that, is by practicing, studying and creating things.

In our environment, the idea of creativity is not like, ‘ok, here’s some colored scarves and colored paper, let’s create,’ do you know what I mean? That’s exploring, and exploration is a part of creativity, but creativity is a long involved process. It involves discipline and commitment and accountability, and muscle and sweat and tears.

We believe in a lot of things I mean there are so many things we believe in.

It was the strongest indictment of education I’ve ever heard. Them saying, ‘a big part of the reason I love The Possibility Project is that it’s not school.’

We also believe in not exploiting our kids’ experiences, and we make sure we never ever author their story for them. We don’t do it in the program. We don’t do it in fundraising. We don’t do it, ever. That’s part of the integrity. That when you peel what we do back to the center, the center holds.

What do they tell you about school?

They don’t like it. We did a three year research project with teachers college at Columbia University, Michael Hanson and the National Center for Children and Families. One of the most consistent responses in the whole survey was how they answered the question about why they like The Possibility Project. They said, ‘because it’s not school.’ It was the strongest indictment of education I’ve ever heard. Them saying, ‘a big part of the reason I love The Possibility Project is that it’s not school.’

Why don’t they like school?

I would say, the reason they don’t like school, God there’re so many reasons. One, they have to sit all day long. They sit in chairs, which I think is crazy. Two, their teachers are not exciting or compelling. Most of their teachers are boring. Three, they don’t understand the relevance of what they’re learning. I think the biggest reason they don’t like school is that they have no idea why they’re there and no one’s even talking about that question.

I just looked at a series of evaluations from last year’s program. We ask a question about our program as it relates to school. “Did this program make you more interested or excited about school?” And every single one of them was ‘no.’ On a four point scale, four being ‘a lot,’ one being ‘none at all,’ it was ‘none.’ Now mind you, we’re trying. I just think they’ve given up on it. School sucks.

It is harder to get people excited about solving systems of equations than performing a musical.

Yes yes, but if those are happening in the same community. If the musical community is the same community that’s sitting next to each other in the classroom, it would change. And if the teachers that are teaching math were instructed to make it relevant. Not like ‘ok 3 hos meet 9 pimps. 3 hos and nine pimps makes how many fucked up people?’ that’s not what I’m talking about, not that sort of ‘cool hip-hop relevance.’ I’m talking about, let’s talk about why math is important. Spend the first week just giving them the history of mathematics. When you’re a child, not so much, but by the time you’re a teenager, that question of ‘why’ needs to be answered.

To read about the evening we spent with the teenagers and artistic directors of The Possibility Project click here.

(Young people from TPP’s Foster care program also wrote and acted in a real feature film titled Know How. You can stream it on Netflix.)